A couple of months ago I spilled boiling water onto my foot while I was draining potatoes so I shoved my foot under a cold tap for half and hour and then loosely covered it with cling film as the nhs website instructed over the next few weeks it bloomed and festered into a series of abstract expressionist motifs before it crusted over flaked away and became two permanent blotchy archipelagos at the top of my foot there we go I thought to myself good job I didn’t bother those tireless souls at a&e with my witless fuckery although in these mundane days of climate catastrophe the archipelagos have given fruit to a population of reddish pinpricks because the new strata are particularly sensitive to heat rash and so the conscious part of my brain-circus tries to arrest my hand mid-motion as it reaches to scratch every half hour or so but most of the time I only notice mid-scratch when the body has been doing its own thing and the self is really an intermittent a-ha that tends to go on the blink in the event of a heatwave and on that subject there was that thing two days ago where I was walking home with the shopping in the thirty degree heat and as I slid my key into the front door lock I realised that the last ten minutes of my journey home had been permanently wiped from my memory and I wondered if I was even conscious at all during that time or maybe I was conscious but the memory was wiped or maybe I was abducted by aliens who then conscientiously dropped me at my door like a nice boy on a first date but then I thought no not on a hot day like this
28/5/26